Most community sites take a while to grow and you really never know what will happen. Even Reddit was sort of a failure vs. Digg and they sold it off to conde nast. It was only later AFTER the sale when Digg messed up on their own and Reddit enjoyed success as a side effect.
You really shouldn't be building a community site if you're so impatient to give up so early. I mean the site opened to public in October 26 of 2016, that's exactly 7 months in existence. It's probably because they raised so much money, which is why you should never raise too much money when you're trying to build a community site. I have never seen a successful community site that raised that much money before getting traction.
Other sites can get away with some bad choices like login-required because of momentum, but... The culture and userbase they were hoping to attract was more akin to tumblr, and Tumblrites were never going to leave it for Imzy.
Those used to reddit, meanwhile, saw a signup/login screen (or even a "request an invite" screen) and boredly clicked off. Some actively looking for reddit alternatives (like me) waited to get in, but not many.
First time I've heard of Imzy I believe, and this was my exact reaction when I went to their front page.
It's really difficult to offer perspective like that on something you don't really understand and haven't seen from the inside.
It's pretty clear if you don't have product-market fit as a founder. And if you don't have a really good idea of what you could do to get to product-market fit, it's entirely possible it's wise of the founders to stop and try something new, which is what I hope they plan to do now.
Much love to Dan, Jessica & the Imzy team. I know how hard this can be; best of luck on whatever comes next.
Communities =/= products. An entirely different kind of thinking and patience is required to grow a community as opposed to build a product.
I mean they could theoretically take it off sure. But communities are very rarely going to be 'rocket ship' style instant successes like more traditional service and product businesses. And given how hard they are to make profitable, or how a lot of things VCs will want in order to make them profitable will hurt the community...
Yeah, not sure this is the best kind of thing to try and build as a startup business/get venture capital for. At least not initially, before the momentum is built and the community is proven to be successful.
I have never seen a successful community site
that raised that much money before getting traction.
So there's an example of site, without much money, building off their community. It's filled with a lot of hate, racism and extremism.
I still like browsing it, just to see the opinions, try to understand where others are coming from and expose myself to viewpoints I disagree with.
There is some good content and some viewpoints I agree with, but I wish more reasonable people on there weren't so drown out. I think moderate people do try, but after barrages of downvotes, they give up (new accounts can't downvote either; you have to build 100 comment points -- which keeps that group think going).
As an entrepreneur, if you spend 10 years on something, you can get 4, potentially 5 done over your life time. If you fail early, you can try 20-30. I suspect the chances of actually succeeding are much higher in the latter case.
Instagram was already a hit at 7 months, and even whatsapp was clearly going to be big. I totally understand closing shop without enough traction.
I've been involved with quite a few startups and initiatives, and for every "we shouldn't have closed so early", there are about twenty "we should have closed it much much earlier"
When they're funded it's great, but when investors who are expecting some multiple quickly pull out it's game over.
I'm not sure if that's the case here, this is just a general thought about early shutdowns.
I also have an amazing staff of developers, community minded folks, product people, executives, who are looking for work. Many of them mare open to moving (we are in Salt Lake City) and all are open to remote work. They are all very talented. Please drop me a line if you're interested.
Have you considered contacting Internet Archive - or specifically, "Archive Team" - and coordinating with them to package up and deliver an archive of the public data that was produced on your platform ?
> We still feel that the internet deserves better and hope that we see more teams take on this challenge in the future
As someone with a headful of ideas hoping to potentially take on this challenge (:P) - any writeups or info on scaling/architecture would be much appreciated. There are some HighScalability articles on the bigger sites but every bit of info on comparison of architectures helps us newbies, heh.
Also, as others asked about - if you guys do manage to open source, that could be a starting point for those who liked Imzy's layout/model (personally as one of the ones who likes aspects of "oldschool" and novel design concepts, I'd go in a diff direction; but the engine could still help me figure out components needed and possibly other scaling/metrics/etc logic)
Thanks for giving it a shot, take care man.
I don't think Imzy's scalabilities issue is what did them in. I signed up to see what it was about, and saw a JS bug and reported it, and they not only fixed it super-quick, but also sent me a thank-you sticker. So their team, while imperfect as all teams are, was at least responsive and dedicated.
If I had to guess - and I do - their problems stemmed from their community size not growing as rapidly as it could have, and monetization.
That's the interesting thing - how do you build a community? How do you build a bunch of communities? How do you advertise, how do you tackle moderation successfully, how do you keep people invested, etc.
There's a billion write-ups on writing code, but nowhere near enough on running a meta-community.
If you're an engineer like me, we'll often overweight tech choices, rather than the product and user acquisition decisions that matter in a social network.
Can you explain a bit about how you tried to monetize the site? What did you try? What worked and what didn't?
It's incredibly small for the amount of media attention they received. I think shutting down is the right, and responsible move here.
Bit curious if there was any weighting algorithm in the voting?
If we had done better with this, we could have gone to market quicker and probably done a better job finding product/market fit.
There's of course more, but this is the biggest thing.
That was also the time it was opened to the public. This shutdown appears to be a strong counterpoint against Reddit alternatives becoming an inherently successful business prospect.
It looks like Voat is not in good financial shape too:
Edit: oh wait, that's $8M in October 2016, not 2015 - ie 8 months ago. Burning $1M a month does seem quite high. Maybe they're shutting down early to give some money back to investors?
The pic in your linked article shows 12 people. If they didn't have traction, they shouldn't have exorbitant server costs either.
So where's it all go?
There's a fine line between the freedom to express yourself and offending someone else. As a community moderator, choosing what is and isn't offensive is by definition subjective. It's an impossible task for a global, multi-cultural community. You end up with a vanilla message board where most interesting thought/debate is stifled. Reminds me of the campus "safe space" debate.
I remember writing an ebook on affiliate marketing when it was a new thing (free for email subscribers), which had the word Bullshit stamped on an image. Two people said maybe I should tone down the language heh.
Fuck right off, buddy :D
Don't worry about people in a community who get easily offended. If they like the community they'll stay, if not then there's not really anything lost.
If I recall, it got started right around the time there was a lot of shenanigans going on at Reddit around corporate drama, censorship, and the nastier subreddits. Imzy and Voat popped up to try to offer an alternative. (My impression is that Imzy was aiming for less awfulness and Voat aims for less censorship.)
Like Reddit?
this is an hard thing to enter into. specifically, it scores just 3 on the 5 startup needs, specifically:
- requires content to attract user
- requires users to attract users
yes this is something that exists mostly in my mind, but works most of the time.
"We now have a number of years to take our time and get the community thing right."
Less then a year later they give up. Why? Some minutes ago, there was a post of the founder here saying they still have most of that $8m: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411586
The #1 problem with a community startup: Every community is itself a startup.
The revenue math and compounded growth all makes sense, but you need to assume that few of your communities survive, and that they each take as long as a startup to get traction and grow.
If it takes you 1 year to get an MVP of sufficient quality to start attracting communities, it's still going to take the community at least a year to have sufficient attractiveness to bring in members. And it's unlikely that either will take as short as a year, and if it did that isn't going to be enough to bring in another round of funds to keep going.
Community startups are hard.
Ain't that the truth. I've got scars to prove it.
give it time. reddit's not done shittying up their UI - hell, they're just getting started :)
isn't that mostly a function of the userbase? any social network is bounded to attract radicals from all sides, especially one that allows anonymous users, and those are the ones that produces the highest content/user
Some of the problems I had:
1) The interface was confusing. Making posts was confusing.
2) Users were allowed to create communities, and they did. There were a gajillion of very tiny communities. This fragments the userbase and makes each tiny community seem dead.
3) Not enough users. Seriously, seeding the community with posts is a good thing. It sets tone and gives people something to interact with. If you're a startup in this space you need to hire a few people on minimum wage and get them to spend 9 hours a day making posts on different accounts.
It's a shame to see it go.
Agree on it being a shame though. Imzy was founded by a contingent of "the good admins" who've left reddit, as far as I can tell.
(1) Two years is too little time to create a Reddit alternative (2) shutting it down in less than 30 days is really bad.
It's just that when you take $8M+ of VC money, they don't want to wait around. They want "dat hockey stick" within a couple of quarters. I think it's wise and honorable for Imzy to recognize that they're unable to satisfy those conditions and bow out instead of continuing to blow investor money and keep the staff on a dead-end job.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-reddit-got-hu...
(I'm not proposing Vice as a great source, but it's the first thing that came up on google.)
Granted, I didn't think it was a startup but a hobby project run by 2 or 3 volunteers on their free time... That millions and millions are invested in such projects is a mystery to me.
Imzy is a company that came, raised over $10MM in funding, and went out of business in 7 months. This is the first I've heard of them.
How on earth does that happen? It's inexplicable.
We're also a nonprofit and don't accept ad revenue or investment, so please excuse the plug. In contrast to Imzy, we're more focussed on conversation than community-building, but this enables us to make our sharing model harrassment-proof by design.
I wish there was a simple Reddit clone that focused on positivity, like Imzy, but it seems that all of these things are way too expensive.
I mean cmon, eight million dollars (in the last round alone) wasn't enough to keep a link sharing site alive? How is that possible? What on earth were they spending that money on?
UpliftingNews, Wholesomememes seem to be very popular, positive shit being the main content
I'm sorry to say I was cynical and doubted they would last.
You can't force a community to happen. I never followed Voat but I did give imzy a chance and the feeling was very much that they were trying to force a community.
Personally I think the best chance of building a community is to build it around a service. Look at reddit and imgur for examples. They both started out offering a pretty specific service to users but grew into communities because people could use the service in a social way.
I believe there are other examples of this but mentioning instagram feels silly since they're now owned by THE largest community. But it's the same thing, they were a photo website and now every 13 year old is there.
I'm sure there are more examples of this. Offer a service to people, something mildly useful or entertaining, and attach a social aspect to it and I'm sure you'll get a community to spring up.
This article by Chris Dixon sums up what you're trying to say — couldn't agree more with it!
1. Barrier to entry was a login (I had previously gone here and left when it first started, and didn't sign in. I eventually created an account just to check it out.)
2. Interface was confusing
3. Exploration felt difficult
4. It wasn't immediately obvious why I was there
5. Not enough juice/content to bring me back
tl;dr: Social networks + open domain communities are hard.
An argument can also be made that "echo-chamber bubbles" are affecting people personally, intellectually, and culturally in tremendously harmful ways, so this is a very tiny step in the right direction.
Meanwhile, the best "debates" I've ever had were with people within what could arguably be described as my "filter bubble."
Reddit needs alternatives to it that works better.
I am working with someone to open source their Kr5ddit code on Github by rewriting it. Look at http://k666.kr5ddit.com which is a start with no money invested yet. Look at http://kr5ddit.com to see how it uses bitcoins to buy Kr5ddits used to moderate stories and comments. It is not complete yet, but it is a good idea and allows anonymous posts without an account, but you can't earn kr5ddits without an account. Imzy tequired invites to get an account.
What would "works better" entail?
That being said, our original base plan (like Imzy's) never really materialized (because of the harsh "network effects" AKA "chicken or egg problem"), so we've since pivoted allowing us to use most of our core tech (of which we admit we slightly over-built at the time) in a separate (but still completely tied in) SaaS-like service that allows bloggers to have their own Reddit-like communities for their blogs.
Utilizing a voting community on a blog brings several previously untapped benefits which I won't get into here, but our recently launched landing page at the Blog Enhancement Suite (http://blogenhancement.com) explains it. Note: It's still a work in progress and we're playing around and A/B testing the copy, but the service is live.
I've been paying attention to and observing Imzy ever since I learned about it, which was shortly after their launch. Some mistakes I feel they made, right off the top of my head:
1. No front page (for lurkers): They force users to join to be able to view content. The 90/9/1 rule is real, ESPECIALLY in the "community" space. 90% of users just want to lurk and that's just the nature of the internet. It's probably the same here on HN. 9% will participate in some ways, voting, etc. 1% will submit and comment, etc.
2. Lacking in social media: I've been following the @Imzy Twitter account for the entire duration, and most of their Twitter activity basically stopped approx 5-6 months ago. At that point I had a feeling that they we're starting to "give up" because it likely wasn't effective enough for the time they we're dedicating to it. We faced that exact problem, but we split up our content into 15 main categories (science, gaming, politics, tech, etc) and have Twitter, Medium, Wordpress, etc profiles for each. We then automated them using IFTTT using our category RSS feeds so that each account automatically tweets/shares the best posts as submitted by our users into said category.
3. No real target market: It's really hard to get people to stick around when most of them DO NOT share most common interests. Again, it's why we made sure to categorize the content so that people that want Science stuff can easily find it and/or subscribe to the Science RSS, follow the Science Twitter account, etc. We now also only focus on attracting bloggers, our new REAL target market (in a business sense) after the pivot.
4. Giveaways: Imzy was giving away all these plushys and stickers and stuff in return for loyalty. I just don't believe many people care about gimmicky things like that and it must drive up the costs/expenses that could otherwise be spent elsewhere with more effectiveness.
Imzy IMHO also did a lot right. I envy their PR tactics/strategy, as they got mentioned on all the top tech sites numerous times. Their devs/team made a solid app/website.
I wish the Imzy folks best of luck in their future endeavors.
We started as a "build your own HackerNews" then we transitioned it to a "build your community" tool. We've been going for about 3 years - a plenty of work to do and undergoing a pretty big re-design at the moment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/533ml7/our_journe...
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/18/anti-reddit-platform-imzy-...
Sounds like it had nothing to do with the project...
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/25/a-chat-with-imzy-co-founde...
But at soon as you allow discussion of something even slightly substantive people will start to perceive some opinions as attacks on their ego.
No matter how rational and dispassionate an argument objectively is, someone will perceive it as violence.
What happens is that "tolerance, kindness and mutual respect" becomes "protection of the moderator's ego" and adherence to an ever expanding set of intellectual dogmas.
What I find funny you might find offensive (thats how humor works some times) by trying to have rules and enforce them your always pissing someone off... the less you have the better and let people be their own filter.
Worse, several of the interaction, UI/UX, and management decisions simply amplified the initial bias (as is often the case).
Imzy was doomed out of the gate, despite some interesting ideas.
Therefore it's extremely important for such people to establish the world as a a safe space against safe spaces, and to push the idea that such spaces are untenable or morally bad or whatever will avoid more of those spaces existing.
Bad marketing?